A while ago, I posted a reconstruction I did of an archaic aurochs from India. This time, I did a little sculpture of an aurochs that was even older, the Wadi Sarrat skull. It was published in 2015, found in Tunisia and is roughly 770.000 years old. The skull is only partially preserved, but with complete horn cores that have astonishing dimensions. The horns face forward in a 40° angle. No postcranial material has been recovered as far as I know.
I reconstructed the body based on the Store-damme skeleton and the head and horns precisely after photos of the Wadi Sarrat skull. For the colouration, I was inspired by a colour found in many wildtype-coloured zebu: black base colour with a dorsal stripe, light areas on the ventral body and brownish flanks. There is no evidence for the colour of aurochs that old, and since the Wadi Sarrat skull is outside the modern aurochs crown group, we have a bit of artistic license for the colour. Here is the sculpture:
If the bull the Wadi Sarrat skull belonged to was proportioned like that, it would have been 160cm tall at the withers.
No comments:
Post a Comment